Does anyone remember when the United Way was called the "Community Chest" and supported local, apolitical organizations?

Miss America 1989 Gretchen Carson insists that she be respected for her brain, not her ACHIEVEMENT of fame by being the country's "community chest". okay by me, though i'm dubious.

Well I do; kids' baseball teams, our parks, girl scouts, whathaveyou. It was local, the effects were immediate, and you knew where your money was going. Now it's a nation-wide organization that defunds, in Greenwich and across the country, the Boy Scouts for refusing to bow to the gay agenda (actually, I believe the BSA has caved on that issue), pays national board members and staff millions of dollars and runs women empowerment sessions, like the one held yesterday at the Greenwich Country Club (snicker). I stopped giving these people money more than a decade ago.

Speaking Tuesday before a Greenwich audience of hundreds, mostly women, [Miss America] Carlson urged them to speak out and fight — for themselves and other women.

“For anyone here today who is looking to be inspired, stand up and speak up because you’ve been put down in any aspect of your life,” Carlson said. “As women we will not be underestimated, intimidated or set back by misogynists who stereotype and demean us. We will not be silenced through the ways of the establishment or the relics of the past. We will stand up together and use our voices to be the women we were meant to be.”

This was said, mind you, to Ms. Carlson's fellow Greenwichites, surely the most privileged, spoiled people on earth.

Carlson was the keynote speaker for the 12th annual Sole Sisters Luncheon, a Greenwich United Way initiative. The luncheon is the agency’s biggest fundraiser of the year and helps support human service programs for Greenwich’s most vulnerable residents.

The Greenwich Association of Realtors supports all this, and the chain store franchise realtor firms that now rule Greenwich  all push for 100%  participation in United Way's annual fund dive, but that's an invitation I resist: if ladies wish to dine at the GCC, let them join the Garden Club; I'm not inclined to subsidize millionaire social justice warriors